This StackOverflow question brought me to write this blog post. The question was, how it would be possible to specify the datasource item when you want to add a rendering directly from the code in Sitecore MVC.

There are two types on how it’s possible to add a layout or a rendering to a page request:

• The renderings is attached via the presentation details of an item (called dynamic binding).
• The rendering is added directly in the code of another rendering (called static binding).

Dynamic bindings are usually configured by a developer in the Content Editor. Depending on how to add content to an item, also components added by authors within the Page Editor are dynamically binded. A little different from this is the static binding: It’s added directly into any Razor view (i.e. a Sitecore view rendering) by a developer with the following line of code:

@Html.Sitecore().Rendering("<your rendering definition item id>")

With an anonymous object, it is possible to add other parameters to the rendering. The datasource of the rendering is one parameter and can be specify as follow:

@Html.Sitecore().Rendering("<your rendering definition item id>", new { DataSource = "<your datasource item id>" })

This has the same result as when the datasource item has been chosen within the dialog in a dynamic binding. It’s also possible to add other parameters, for example to specify the type of caching:

@Html.Sitecore().Rendering("<your rendering definition item id>", new { Cacheable = true, CacheKey = "my_rendering", Cache_VaryByData = true })